What is Circle.so ? – A Perfect Community Platform
Community building is fundamental to human existence. Over the years of digital evolution, online communities have become a solid ground for exchanging ideas, sharing experiences, and building connections with like-minded people. These communities have been of real value to brands.
As popular online community platforms, like Facebook and Reddit, are becoming overcrowded, new platforms are emerging. These new platforms promise to provide better experiences for the audience; more targeted communities and monetization opportunities for the brands. Circle.so is one of them.
Circle: The community platform for creators
Circle.so is specially designed for creators who are willing to bring together their community members around their very own content and engage them in topics that are worth being a part of.
The aim is to turn the community members into paying members to generate revenue but also improve people’s skills. The platform helps you build a strong online community around the services you provide or a specific product, or even your content.
As a creator with Circle, you can create several communities that include product, coaching, course, and membership communities – all serving a different purpose. It also allows you to form podcast and newsletter communities, which have been trending at number one these days.
Discussions can be held in both private and public spaces at your convenience. The spaces are fully customizable, allowing you the hang of how you want your community to interact exactly.
The motto of Circle is to ring together memberships, content, and discussions streamlined through a single platform. They aim to integrate a thriving community exactly where your audience belongs, under your very own brand name.
The types of communities you can create as a Circle creator
Membership communities
The platform offers you the flexibility to curate a personal membership experience belonging to nobody else by you and what you have to offer.
It is a paid community where people pay in order to be a part of your Circle.so existence. It also involves direct integrations with Memberspace, Memberstack, and much more. Circle.so offers exclusive memberships, premium memberships, paid newsletters, communities for courses, and conference communities as a part of the membership community.
Micro schools
This particular space provides a special platform for your students, teachers, and parents in order to be a part of your micro-school. In this community, you can seamlessly share the resources, be organized and help them be the same, and also discuss schoolwork to help them through it.
Course communities
You can also add a community to your subject course and help the students connect with one another. This also improves student behavior and understanding along with betterment in the student outcomes. Course communities integrate well with Kajabi, Teachable, and other similar course platforms for seamless functioning.
Product communities
Product communities offer your customers an exclusive space that allows them to share ideas with one another in order to how they can make use of your products in the best possible way. This also somehow improves the chances of your product sale since multiple people come up with multiple product usage, driving up the sales and revenue.
Newsletter communities
Newsletter communities are specially formulated for avid readers who are smart and have a lot in common with their fellow readers. This community/platform helps them reach out to each other and meet one another online and continue the discussion in your community itself.
Coaching communities
Coaching communities are made to provide a dedicated space for all your coaching clients. This platform gives them access to resource material, interact directly with you and even connect with each other for betterment and enhancement of quality of work.
Brands and startups
The brands and startups community provides a space for an engaging and interactive community that helps you build a strong brand. You can directly integrate your community into your service, product, or website for better results.
Podcast communities
Last but not least is the very famous podcast community. With podcasts gaining huge popularity these days, this is one of the most important communities that one shall have if it suits their brand. Some people are eager to connect, interact and listen.
If your audience is the same, it is a must to keep the conversation going after the main episode is done. Premium content can be offered via podcasts that are not available elsewhere to ensure that your audience gets nothing other than the best.
The top 3 use cases of Circle.so
Organize discussions
The primary use case of Circle.so is to organize discussions that add value to your listeners. You can introduce welcome discussions, tips, and tricks, a specialty of your products, or something around what are the benefits of your product.
It can be anything and everything around your brand which will actually work forward to strengthen the brand name.
The topics must be interactive and focused on building a valuable conversation and keeping it the same way all time around. Your community members can share their big wins, find a support system, collaborate, communicate, and so much more through the private and public discussion spaces.
Create private spaces
The other unique thing about Circle.so is that it allows you to create private spaces for discussions that are only meant for a few people. This keeps you away from exposing the conversations to the public, and the secrecy (if need be) is maintained.
Such sessions can involve private one-to-one questions, upcoming exclusive events, 1-1 feedback., mastermind games, live sessions, and more that cater to only a specific group of people or individuals.
Empower interest groups
The platform also encourages you to empower the interest groups that either belong to your brand, product, service, or content. The groups can be specifically targeted to a set of a single location, type of people, or mutual benefit and interest.
This use case helps you in local meetups, forming book clubs, and improving personal growth by connecting with like-minded people.
What else Circle.so offers?
1. The platform is specially built to engage in discussions, people, and connections through valuable posts, great content, member profiles, direct messaging, and much more that contribute to creating a community where real connections are formed.
2. It also provides you with analytical statistics and reports that show you which are the topics that people engage with the most in order for you to up your discussion game and be forward in the same.
3. Circle also provides you with a premium, white-label community experience by improving your branding through your community. It helps you fully customize everything by letting you choose the brand colors, adding a custom domain, and owning all of your member data with no terms and conditions applied. The platform also lets you commit with each other easily.
4. Circle.so helps you monetize your community and the efforts you put in building it by using Circle paywalls. This helps you charge for your community and get access to premium spaces and even exclusive content.
5. Seamless integrations are a subset of the Circle.so platform.
It helps you integrate your community into your product, online course, website, or membership experience within minutes. All the flows across your creator’s stack are automated with seamless integrations, and operations are made better, simpler, and faster.
Top Circle.so features
Robust integrations
Integrations are what make Circle.so an extremely strong platform to trust and begin our creator’s improvement journey with. It connects your community to your existing site or with an online course platform that makes sense to the community members.
Ownership
One of the best things about Circle.so is that it provides you with complete ownership of your community members. This means that you cannot elbow your way to your audience, and all you have to do is add valuable content to stick around and have their trust built.
Customizations
Circle.so provides strong customizations from top to bottom by letting you choose everything from your brand colors to choose a custom domain. This makes your community members feel that they are on your very own platform and not just Circle.so.
Paywalls
Their newly introduced Paywalls feature allows you to charge your community to give them access to private spaces and exclusive content. It is a powerful yet flexible payment system that is specially built for Circle and saves you the time, cost, and pain of integrating with the payment platforms.
They offer you to charge your community monthly/annually, accept one-time payments, and even offer multiple access tiers and membership options. There are also free trials, and one-click upsells that help in building your revenue generation.
Live stream
Another newly added feature is that the virtual experience that is one of the most important things in today’s world, especially after the ongoing pandemic.
Circle strives to make the experience easier by hosting live video streams within the platform and interact with a maximum of 10 hosts and 500 participants around the world. They are working further to integrate with the platform as a whole and to make it an even larger experience for everybody.
Events
Events is another feature of the platform that helps people who are fond of in-person and off-platform events. They are very soon coming up with spaces that are dedicated solely to virtual and in-person events.
This feature allows the member to RSVP with a single click. Everything else is taken care of by the platform itself; from receiving customizable confirmations, calendars, reminders, and more, it is all the platform’s responsibility to overlook.
Member directory
Circle helps you find like-minded people. It does so by introducing a powerful member director that is available to all the members to find each other. It allows them to filter one another way spaces, bios, time, locations, and other custom profile fields to get connected with the people that they would literally ‘connect’ with.
Bulk import
Circle allows you to import your members in bulky one click, through a CSV file. You can also add an email invite to ensure that the members you import are encouraged to accept the invite and join your community.
How much does the platform cost?
One of the most important questions and a deciding factor whether you want to go forward with a platform or not is its pricing. If you have so far liked the idea behind the platform, let us now introduce the Circle pricing chart as well. the Circle platform comes with three major plans –
Basic plan
The basic plan costs $39 per month and helps you start with a simple and basic community with bare essentials. It includes –
- 10 spaces
- Zapier integration
- 1000 members
- Custom domain
- SSO with Memberspace and Memberstack
Professional plan
The Professional plan costs $99 per month, but the discounted price right now is $79 per month. This plan includes key features and higher usage limits such as –
- 20 spaces
- 10,000 members
- White-labeled community
- API access
- Custom CSS and JavaScript
- SSO with WordPress and Memberful
- Advanced reporting
- Priority emails support
Enterprise plan
The enterprise plan costs $199 per month and is a community that considers you a serious business. It helps you strengthen your brand by pricing –
- 3 communities
- 1,000 spaces
- 100,000 members
- Dedicated Account Manager
- Custom SSO with OAuth
The platform also offers a free trial for 14 days if you wish to get the hang of it without actually paying the amount already.
Conclusion
Considering the idea behind the platform, Circle is a unique opening towards building a strong brand with a personal touch of newness and opportunity.
It helps you connect with more and more people and include them in your customer base, improving connectivity and engagement. It is truly a powerful platform that is here to make the change!
Give it a try and let us know how it’s turning out for you.